Show Report: Retro Con at VGXPO

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The death of a games convention.

By Travis Fahs

Every year, I take the trek to Philadelphia to visit one of the biggest and best retrogaming shows in the country. I've been doing it since 2001, back when it was called Philly Classic, and still in its second year. That show might have been shoved into a small meeting room on the bottom floor of an airport hotel, but the community couldn't have been more committed. Within the cramped confines of its limited floors pace, there were many one-of-a-kind items; a table with the most impressive collection of handheld systems I've ever seen; a gallery of six ultra-rare Adventure Vision consoles on display for all to play, and a prototype Jaguar VR helmet that I still kick myself for not buying. Much of the show was something like a large yard sale of rare items, but it got enough attention to give the show some real momentum.

By the very next year, Philly Classic had moved to the convention center in Valley Forge, PA, and occupied a massive show floor all by itself. It attracted thousands of gamers from around the world, with aisles of homebrewers peddling their newest releases for the Vectrex and Atari Lynx. Plenty of vendors showed up to sell off their piles of classic games, but others showed up simply to pay homage to their cult favorites. One man drove eight hours from Buffalo, NY just to display a running Nuon so everyone could experience Tempest 3000. Another displayed a huge table of one-of-a-kind Atari prototypes – including that VR helmet I should have bought. There was even a table run by a Vectrex enthusiast who came all the way from Germany to show off his Battlezone prototype. The show also introduced a massive arcade collection featuring all sorts of rarities dating back to the '70s, including the pinball/game hybrid Baby Pac-Man, and sit-down Night Driver unit – no quarters needed.

Huge selections of homebrew and playable arcade history used to be the lifeblood of VGXPO.

That show had put Philly on the classic gaming map, and over the next couple years it came to rival the Classic Gaming Expo in size and draw. It was so successful, in fact, that it was bought out, and rebranded VGXPO. I was there for what would have been the sixth year of Philly Classic to find the "new" show, while slightly smaller, still retained what made it great. Wandering through the show, the father of videogames himself Ralph Baer could be spotted, alongside a man dressed up as a Pitfall cartridge. Baer was even kind enough to bring his brown box prototype with him, allowing gamers to traverse video game history from beginning to present. It's true that the new show also included tournaments for newer games and vendors selling current-gen titles, but we all still knew why were there.

This year, VGXPO was held in the Pennsylvania Convention Center in the heart of Philadelphia. It promised to be the biggest year in the history of the event, with a sizable sub-event called "Retro Con" to nurture the base. Alas, the crowded event was more of a funeral than a celebration, packed to the gills with angry, depressed visitors who waited hours to tour what amounted to a giant billboard.

The first of several lines to get in went all the way down the hall and back.

The turnout was absolutely staggering this year, which made the poor organization of the show that much more glaring. Lines wrapped all the way down the hall and back to get tickets, and even after that, a bouncer was placed at the bottom of the escalator to let people up a few at a time – for no apparent practical benefit. The main show floor certainly had an impressive layer of corporate glitz this year, thanks largely to the presence of Intel, who used the event to showcase their newly launched i7 processors. Nearby, Commodore re-introduced a beloved old brand to America once again, in the form of a line of high-end gaming PCs. But as I wandered past a booth for Suicide Girls and another selling ornamental knives, it became apparent that indiscriminately selling booth space to the highest bidder severely weakens the concept of this show.

The schizophrenic assortment of booths on the show floor only served to obscure anything of substance, and there wasn't much of that to be found. Thankfully, the usual all-free retro arcade was back once more, with dozens of cabs set to free play. It's always a good draw, but even that had shrunk and, more notably, the rarer items seemed to be missing. There was no I, Robot, no Major Havoc, no Computer Space. Time Traveler was a nostalgic new addition, but the show's organizers clearly did not want to invest money and valuable floor space that could be sold to more t-shirt vendors.

The show floor was flashy, but there was no substance.

After casing the show floor and finding no signs of retro gaming beyond the arcade, I started to look for show staff to see if I could find out what was going on. The staff was completely oblivious, but eventually one of the vendors told me the retro stuff had been moved down the hall. That's right, the retro-gaming booths that had been the lifeblood of the show for eight years had been isolated to a small meeting room hidden from view halfway across the convention center, with no signage to let people know. The promised 10,000 square feet of floor space dedicated to Retro Con was a lie.

There were still some real finds at Retro Con. Yes, that's a Marty, a SuperGrafx, and Twin Sticks all in the same picture.

What was left reminded me quite a lot of that first Philly Classic; a room lined with tables, piled high with games for every classic system you could name. The gaming "museum" was a pathetic effort to fend off a false advertising suit – there were rarer items for sale – but it was fun to roam the aisles and talk games with people that actually knew the difference between Intellivision and Colecovision. Amidst the stacks of games, I spotted a boxed FM-TOWNS Marty, a SuperGrafx, and a pile of Microvision titles. It was a great chance to fill in some gaps in the old collection, and a 3DO came home with me.

The small slice of show that was left was still fun, but I was truly saddened to see the homebrewers pushed out, along with so much of what gave this show its personality in years past. With CGE in Las Vegas on hiatus this year, it seems like there really isn't going to be an outlet for retro fans in 2008. Events like this fill me with concern that gaming history might be lost as more of us grow older and drift away, but my optimism was renewed when I saw a boy of about six years old tug at his fathers sleeve. He pointed to Nintendo's first motion controller lying on a table and said "I love the Power Glove. It's so bad." There's hope for the future yet, we just need to find a place to congregate.